My character's STAT is higher than your character's STAT. I gain (or "you lose") 2 IP! It places too much emphasis on character stats and it goes against one of the core principles of the game: for the purposes of story tropes (as opposed to meta tropes), what's in play matters more than who controls it. (The two aspects where "controller" matters are taking up SP and using abilities.)

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

Choose a Villain and a Hero in play. The character with the lower Combat stat is Killed Off for Real. In the case of a draw, both characters are Put on a Bus until the end of their controllers' next turn.

Choose a character in play and target a character with Heroic B.S.O.D., Freak Out! or a Mind Control trope attached. If the chosen character's Love stat is higher than the targeted character's Cyncism stat (Treat -5 Idealism stat as 10 and +5 Idealism as 0), detach one of the tropes mentioned above from the targeted character and place it in the Trash Bin.

There, Ironeye. Everything now relies on another card. And we have diversity of effects. Anyway, all I really felt necessary were that Interactions made it into the game. Well, this might open up some of the genre stats again.

But I do have a bit of a problem with characters being more important than the controller. If that's true, then what's the point in playing him/her. All that the characters seem to be doing is being a massive SP drain. They're not really helping you to win. What would be the point of having a character with, say, 10 in every stat if he/she ends up taking up too much SP and a quick Breaking the Fourth Wall, for instance, will make you go over your SP Limit.

Anyway, please update the rules first. We can work out the tweaks later.

Once every two turns, you may pay 5 SP to invoke Duel to the Death (Except for SP Costs, treat it as though you have played Duel to the Death.) [reminder text: Choose another character in play. If that character's Combat stat is lower than this character's, that character is Killed Off for Real. If the opposite is true, then this character is Killed Off for Real. In the case of a draw, both characters are Put on a Bus until the end of their controllers' next turn.]

Tropes are normally only played during your own scene (turn). Nevertheless, you can play tropes during other player's scenes by spending IP equal to the SP cost of the trope (in addition to the trope taking up SP as normal). The flavor of this is hopefully clear.

I had considering a payment of IP to the player you're interrupting, for balance purposes, but I rejected that idea for two reasons:

IP=SP is the easiest way to implement the system without being broken because it's too cheap, but a score swing of 2 X IP is broken in the other direction.

It causes weird interactions in multiplayer where it could be to your advantage to play a trope during another player's turn to "tribute" IP to them.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

As we currently have it, you can freely play tropes no matter whose turn it is. However, the flavor is better and the mechanics are easier if we consider each player's turn as a "scene" with a lot of effects ending or changing at the end of a "scene".

Because "temporary" (no, that's not their rules name) tropes cost SP the turn you play them, we'd either have to make my "turn" end when my next one begins or otherwise have things broken (especially in multiplayer) by having the SP reset every time a new turn was taken. I figured it was just easiest to use the "scene" model and charge players "influence" for interfering in scenes other than their own.

As for the Fourth Wall tropes, SP just represents how much the writers are able to juggle at once. Reducing SP means that they can't keep track of as they used to, not that they are closer to quitting. Thus, the effect is quite disconnected from actually Breaking the Fourth Wall.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

Right, so we should hold of on defining that trope card until we have a good idea for it. Ideally, we should be making cards for tropes when we have good ideas for the mechanics, not because we come across a trope and think it ought to have a card. We may have to do the latter eventually, but I would rather we hold off on a trope until we have a good idea for it instead of pushing it out ASAP with a mechanic that doesn't match.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

It seems you are having trouble coming up with the set of basic mechanics. Why not go for an Illuminati style game.

Try to build up a story out of trope cards that work well together and help you achieve your goal, while using special meta trope cards to attack your opponent's stories or alter the rules of the game.

I guess I'm not really good at explaining it, but I figured it was worth consideration.

So, I was thinking about this, and I don't think I'm saying anything we haven't said already, but this kind of thing always makes the thread more lively, so here I go:

Well, let's start by assuming there are two players fighting over a shared story (we need two players because solitares are no fun). How do we tell when someone's won the game?

Well, one measurement would be who gets their ending in, because after that the other guy can't do anything, and you had the last laugh. So playing an Ending Trope is victory condition #1.

But suppose you have a Long Runner, and it's probably never going to end. Who wins then? Well, then whoever gets total control of the project wins. (So far we've been representing control with IP; I really think we should call it "control" or "influence" or something because we also have SP and these will get confusing fast.)

For an example of this, take a look at Megatokyo; originally control of it was split evenly between Piro and Largo, then over time Piro got more influence until eventually Largo wasn't doing anything and Piro took his name off the strip.

Incidentally, I just realized about 10 minutes ago that Megatokyo-before-Piro-took-over makes a pretty good model for this card game.

And another random thought: how many cards should we have before we start testing this? I think 10-20 per card type should do it.

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy